How to Bring Style Into Your Office Space

No matter how much you love your job, once you’ve sat at the same desk day after day looking at your colleagues’ ugly old mugs (geddit?), answering e-mails (and the phone ?) and attending meetings, the nine-to-five becomes a little dull. Luckily spring is here, which means it’s the perfect time to tidy up your work space, wipe away old coffee-ring stains, throw out broken pens and sharpen blunt pencils.

1 Declutter
That old printout of a Calvin And Hobbes cartoon once lit up your life cubicle partitions. But you pinned it up five years ago (how time flies!), and now it’s just a faded off-white piece of paper featuring a little sprout of yellow hair and a dull orange blob you can barely see. Pull it down, crumble it up into a little ball and practise your aim with a bin down the corridor. Perfect your paper ball game with the old schedules, a printout of the rules of e-mail etiquette, and to-do lists you put up in your first week. While you’re at it make sure your coffee mug finds its way back to the kitchen and you’ve destroyed any crumby evidence of enjoying lunch al-desko.

Arnold Agency NYC. Credit: thenyegotist.com

2 Find a space between fun and functional
Sure, work isn’t a jol all day long but that doesn’t mean your desk has to be drab. Find fun office accessories that’ll elevate your desk and flaunt your personality. A caveat, though: you don’t want your desk to look like a teenager’s poster-clad bedroom. Bring in a framed print here, a collection of Game Of Thrones bobble heads there, and a couple of family photos for good measure. Up your cred in the style department with tools that look just as chic on your desk – a copper stapler, an on-trend concrete tray (like this one by Country Road, on which you’ll rest your coffee mug keys, business cards and coins), and a pair of Beats that block out the noise when you’re finishing your month-end report, which have the added bonus of looking cool, even when hanging over the top of your screen after you’ve punched out for the day.

3 Bring in the light
Pulling down the partitions helps to reduce shade, but it doesn’t do much for noise pollution. Rather pull up the blinds and let the light stream in. A study done by Northwestern University in the US found that employees who worked in an office with windows received more ‘white light exposure’ and actually slept better than those who worked in windowless offices, suggesting there are health benefits to bringing natural light into an office space.

4 Add a little life
Here at HL, we love an air plant. We love it even more if it’s been put inside a terrarium and strategically positioned on our desk to garner compliments from visitors and colleagues alike. A touch of greenery isn’t just for superficial purposes though. Plants have been found to increase workers’ productivity and happiness. It’s probably all that added oxygen.